It's accountability, not “retribution”

Like a lot of the rest of Washington, DC, a city basically under political occupation, I stayed up way too late Tuesday night watching the election results roll in across the country. A “wipeout.” A “rout.” A “rebuke” that is “resounding,” “stinging,” or “stunning,” depending on who you ask. Journalists are groping for words to describe what just happened as the electorate shifted massively against President Donald Trump, with voters flipping red Senate seats to Democratic blue in such unlikely states as Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, maybe even Mississippi, and shifting local roles toward Democrats all the way down the ballot.

I had a feeling this was going to happen. As I said in my last post, and as many others have observed, Republicans can’t offer an implicit deal of bread and circuses in exchange for Trump’s access to absolute power, impunity, and self-enrichment, then not actually produce any bread. (Or even a good circus—who needs a giant arch and a bunch of murdered fishermen? Bleh, do better.) Trump’s brand has always been stiffing people on contracts. He has now done the same to the American people, blowing up the civic functionality they depend on in the process, and they are telling him and his acquiescent party to stick it.

There was another little omen, too, that gave me an inkling things were going to change. This weekend we celebrated Halloween, in our neighborhood that plays host to an annual blowout of dance parties and family costumes and two-story-tall inflatable mummies. In addition to the (now $7.99 per bag! thanks, inflation) wrapped Halloween candy we were distributing, my wife decided to pour a sack of candy corn she had bought for the kids into a plastic bowl with an animatronic witch hand in the middle. (Like I said: it’s very competitive over here.) “You can’t give out unwrapped candy!” I said, my 1980s trick-or-treat training kicking in, from a period where adults were obsessed with the threat of contaminated treats. “Why not? People can take it if they want,” she said.

The other adults and I left her manning the porch and took the kids trick or treating. When we came back, every single piece of candy corn was gone. “What happened?” I said. “Everybody took some,” she said. Danger (razor blades! covid! sorcery!) notwithstanding, our neighbors had braved the robotic witch and stuck their hands in. No one seemed to fear something wrong with the candy corn, besides it being so sweet it would make their teeth ache. Trust was back, with a side of fuck it. If our friends and neighbors died from bewitched candy corn, they seemed to feel, well, it had been a good run.

What happened on Tuesday night was, similarly, a bid for trust—trust in democracy, in our government, in our elected officials, in each other. This president, author Michael Lewis noted on a podcast this week, thrives on mistrust: “Trump can’t function in a trusting environment. Trump does better if nobody trusts each other, because he’s so personally untrustworthy, right? It’s strategy for him. Everybody’s a criminal. Everything’s rigged. He creates an environment in which he can compete, when nobody trusts each other.” That is the promise of Fox News, of fearmongering about Latin American asylum seekers or queer kids, of gutting critical thought in education while boosting slick generative AI, of Trump’s endless empty promises of healthcare or factory jobs or a $5000 payout: watch my face, not my hands sneaking in to steal your wallet, your independence, your sense of community, your soul. Undermining trust is good for those trying to profit off this country. It does no good to those trying to live happily together within it. 

As the question turns to what Democrats should actually do with their newly acquired power come January, some pundits and political leaders are saying Democrats should focus only on affordability and the future, not on “revenge.” Speaking on Wednesday morning to MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, who suggested that Trump’s party had lost because he was too backward-looking and focused on “retribution” (um, that was not the main reason), aspiring Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries declared, “The American people don’t want us to get even. They want us to get things done on their behalf, because life is way too expensive.” He’s partly right—certainly, the “no bread” problem is extremely real—but that’s because of the corruption and deceit of our leaders, and letting them get away with that is absolutely not what voters are asking for. If you want to restore trust—faith in our officials, the rule of law, and the very idea that the government is here to improve the collective good rather than shovel money to the likes of Trump and Elon Musk—then consequences for governmental lies and misdeeds are imperative. They are not separate issues. Trust can only be rebuilt by a government that says it is trying to help you, and then does help you, while upholding accountability and enforcement for leaders who would undermine our national values in order to rob us blind. 

Given the absurd volume of governmental destruction and compromise in the first two years of this administration, the new Democratic Congress will have its work cut out for it figuring which accountability targets to pick. I tend to agree that impeaching Trump once again may be pointless, for example, while it’s critical to do forensics on the civic devastation and potential data thefts of DOGE and to rein in ICE, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before they architect more unnecessary deaths. Still, I hope that whatever public servants are leading the charge understand that affordability is necessary but not sufficient, just as kids need more from their parents than dinner on the table. After two years of bad-faith governance, Americans are eager to trust again. That means cracking down on those who have betrayed us in the past, as much as it does giving us reason to believe in the future.

Is it weird to have Halloween during election season? Or is it actually the best?

Also, I want to recommend the best new-to-me Halloween song I heard this week, “Vampires Are Not Zombies,” by Robin Bienemann, which has a kind of encyclopedic Jonathan Richman groove that is really working for me. Courtesy of WFMU’s incredible kids’ show Double Dip Recess, which is must-listen in our house.

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What did you think of this election? How hard is trust to rebuild? Tell us in the comments. See you next time.